MURDERED: Dorothy “Toby” Tate

18:07Brit Prawat:I don't get that impression at all. And according to detectives, like, nobody in this whole camera line matched the prints from the scene. Like, they tested everybody. So I think, I don't know why they didn't pass out the photo, but like.

18:18Ashley Flowers:Like, everything in everybody's story was lining up.

18:20Brit Prawat:And they're pretty sure that everyone they talked to was not Toby's killer. And at this point, detectives told us that the case was about as cold as a cold case could get. It got put on a shelf and that's where it stayed for decades. There was nobody even assigned to it. All the while, Toby's family was struggling to make sense of how and why their lives were suddenly upended. I mean, the grief was like an infection that continued to just like rip through their family long after November of 1983. Two months after Toby's murder, her dad died of a heart attack, which Priscilla says she knows was because of a broken heart because her heart was broken, too.

19:03Brit Prawat:She told us that Toby was the only person in the world who really accepted her for who she was. In the wake of her death, Priscilla stopped believing in God. She stopped going to church. She stopped singing. Toby's younger sister, Judy, struggled with alcohol use, though that didn't stop her from calling the sheriff's department every year for updates that didn't come. And Judy's daughter, Elisa, who was seven when her Aunt Toby died, she grew up with her own struggles. And in 1996, she ended up taking her own life. Eight months after that, Judy passed away, too, from a tragic accident where she fell down the stairs on Toby's birthday of all days.

19:42Brit Prawat:So, Priscilla, the only Tate sister left, took on the responsibility of calling the sheriff's office every year. And while she said that they couldn't have been more kind, she didn't get much more than Judy did. And she sort of just resigned herself to thinking that, like, crimes like these are never solved. Like, it's just never going to go anywhere. Still, though, she never stopped calling. And in hindsight, those calls might have done more to move this case forward than anything else. Because fast forward to 2018. Priscilla thinks to call the sheriff's office after the Golden State Killer is arrested to ask if he could have been the one to kill Toby.

20:31Brit Prawat:Same year, same time. Yes, but his MO was totally different. Like he never attacked anyone in their car, at least not that we know one. So they're pretty quick to tell her they don't think he's their guy for this. But Priscilla is in the right headspace because there was evidence collected and preserved in Toby's case that could eventually be used to solve it the way that the Golden State Killer was, right? Like, it was just going to take the right detective to come along and do it. Enter Detective Clint Cole. Now, he's not new. He has been with the San Luis Obispo County Sheriff's Office since 1990.

21:11Brit Prawat:He actually just resigned this year. But in 2017, he became the first investigator assigned to the agency's newly created position of cold case unsolved homicide detective. And that's why about two years after Priscilla called asking about the Golden State Killer, she gets this out of the blue call. And on the other end is this man who says, hi, I'm Detective Cole and I'm going to solve your sister's murder.

21:39Ashley Flowers:I've said it before. I'll say it again. Yes.

21:41Brit Prawat:Yes, this is not the first time that we have talked about Detective Cole. And that's because this man is out here solving cold cases right and left.

21:51Ashley Flowers:I mean, yeah, he's the one who helped solve the Kristen Smart's case.

21:53Brit Prawat:Yeah, and he was San Luis Obispo County Sheriff's Office's first and only cold case detective, like I said. So as you can imagine, when he comes in, he does have dozens of cases on his docket. That's why he didn't get started on Toby's until 2019. But this man has a process. Before he ever makes that call to Priscilla, he has to get his ducks in a row, right? He digitizes the files, cataloging testable evidence. And while the detectives back in the day honed in on that Coke can, to Cole, the blood droplets leading away from Toby's van are what really seem promising. The droplets suggest active bleeding.

22:34Brit Prawat:We know that Toby never left the inside of her van. So that means somehow. The blood belongs to the killer. Probably. Like, he probably cut himself. Now, granted, like, could her blood somehow have been on something? Maybe. But they don't think that that's the most likely scenario. And sure enough, when he sends that sample that, thank God, they still had preserved, that he sends it off to be tested, what they get back is an unknown male DNA profile that doesn't match anyone in the CODIS database.

23:04Ashley Flowers:So definitely not the Golden State Killer because he's there.

23:08Brit Prawat:Yeah, he's in the system by that point. Now, because this is California, their laws allow you to search CODIS for familial links, too. Like, does the killer have a brother or an uncle in prison? So this even, like, widens, like, their search pool. But even that comes up empty, too. So the next step is genealogy. Detective Cole gets a profile created to start looking for potential relatives in genetic databases. And then he has to hit pause. Because that is right when the Kristen Smart case starts breaking. And per sheriff's orders, he basically has to drop everything else to get that across the finish line, which obviously he did.

23:51Brit Prawat:So Toby's case gets kind of punted to others who can at least like pitch in part of their time to help keep things moving. It's not like it totally stops. And they get CeCe Moore at Parabon Nano Labs involved. And as she works out the family tree, she passes off leads to Cole's partner, Detective Jeff Robichotti. And, of course, it was not easy. It never is, right? They find the suspect's father. But this guy has no record of having sons. Of course. So then they have to map out mom's family tree. And that's when they realize that their suspect was raised by a different man and probably never knew his biological father.

24:31Brit Prawat:And anyways, I am zipping through a lot of work that took months to complete. But in the end, they do get a name. The DNA belongs to Stephen Hardy. And that name is nowhere in the files. So Detective Robichaudi's next step is to find out everything he can about this guy. But everything he learns just ends up confusing him more. Now, by this point, Stephen Hardy is deceased. So it's not like Robichotti can just go talk to him. But nothing he is seeing is making him think that this guy is really their suspect. Like, Hardy was a Vietnam War vet who grew up in Ventura, California. He lived a fairly low-key life.

25:17Brit Prawat:He separated from his wife after the war, but they continued to see each other. He was a chain smoker, struggled with drinking, but importantly, had no felony convictions ever. Now, he had like a record in California for some DUIs and other minor alcohol-related charges, but nothing involving like violence that Robichotti could find.

25:38Ashley Flowers:Okay, but isn't that kind of always the story now with a lot of IGG matches? I mean, the Golden State Killer kind of wrote the playbook, like unassuming, normal life.

25:47Brit Prawat:But at the time, Robichotti is like, he had never had a case of his like this before. Like, this was a first. And he just did not know what to think.

25:55Ashley Flowers:Well, and I mean, I brought up Golden State Killer, but he also had murdered more than a dozen people over the decade. This would just kind of be a one-off murder.

26:04Brit Prawat:Right. And it's not like Hardy's DNA pings on any other cases in CODIS, right? Plus, there was a real issue. Roe Bashadi could never put Hardy in San Luis Obispo. Honestly, he said if he didn't have this guy's DNA saying he was there, he likely would have looked the other way when it came to this guy. There were only two things that stood out that made them really believe that the blood evidence wasn't some kind of fluke. One is that 30-something-year-old Hardy, who has a girlfriend and a steady job, suddenly did seem to have become transient after Toby's murder. Almost like something set him off down a different path.

26:47Brit Prawat:Two, the family member that connected him, like through genealogy, was Hardy's sister. And when they talked to her, she told them that around the time that the murder happened, her brother had this pronounced limp. And when she asked him about it, he said that he was out on Route 1 trying to help a woman whose car was on the side of the road when this oncoming car ran over his foot. And Robichotti thought, like, that's a really weird story to tell. Eerily similar to kind of Toby's whole situation.

27:22Ashley Flowers:Yeah, I mean, don't people say the best lies have like a grain of truth to them?

27:27Brit Prawat:Yeah, and like plus like Detective Kohl's in his eyes, he said like if a car hits you on the side of the highway, like you're gonna have a bit more damage than just like a little bit of a limp.

27:35Ashley Flowers:Yeah, like a limp is almost like a car actually like slow rolled over your foot. I don't know, going at a super low speed in a parking lot, right?

27:45Brit Prawat:So Robichotti can't put his finger on it. But even still, even with these two weird things, something just isn't sitting right. So he decides to double confirm by going back to the evidence, to the one thing that they have been using to rule people in or out since 1983. The prints on that Coke can. Right. So he taps a woman named Shelby Liddell, this forensic specialist with the sheriff's office who we're told is something of a wizard when it comes to fingerprint analysis. Robichotti basically says to her like, hey, we have a suspect. Can you run the prints from the scene against him to confirm?

28:21Brit Prawat:Typically, what that would mean is that Shelby would get the exemplar prints from the suspect and the latent prints from the soda can and look at them side by side. That is not what Shelby does. And the reason why is important. She doesn't want confirmation bias to get anywhere near her work, especially if she has to defend it in court. So rather than do this like one-to-one comparison, before ever pulling the exemplar prints, she decides to just run the latent prints through the FBI's print system again herself. Like start from scratch. And actually before I get into this, like quick crash course on this, like on how it works, because I don't think we've ever like gone over it.

29:03Brit Prawat:And I actually, I know we haven't because I didn't truly know myself until our reporter Nicole like sat down in the lab with Shelby and got a master class. So the basic process is, like, you run a latent print through the system, and it returns a list of possible matches with a score.

29:18Ashley Flowers:Not just, like, this is it. But, like, 100 % is the best, and then, like, 75 % is pretty good, and 25 % is, like, TBD.

29:25Brit Prawat:So then it's up to the lab tech to, like, go in and independently verify everything. So this is what Shelby does with the Coke handprints. But when she gets the list back, the scores aren't even super great. So she starts going through the matches one by one, ruling them out, ruling them out. And when she gets to number four, she is like, OK, bingo. This is a make. I've got a match here. So that's when she goes and she looks at the name. And it is not the suspect name that detectives gave her. So just to double check, she tries the whole process again with another print that was lifted from like a different finger from the Coke can.

30:02Brit Prawat:Runs through the list, finds a match, looks at the name. same guy, not their suspect. And Shelby literally has like a second person double check her work just to make sure. But they reach the same conclusion. The prints do not match Stephen Hardy. They match a man in the fingerprint system named Charlie Sneed. And this dude is from Texas. Like at least with Stephen Hardy, he was in the same state. Yeah. Right. So it's even harder to be like, why is his print at the scene? So once again, detectives Robichotti and Cole don't know what to make of this, but they know that none of the science is wrong.

30:43Brit Prawat:It has been checked over and over again at this point. They're missing a piece of the puzzle.

30:49Ashley Flowers:But we said at the top, like the Coke can might not be connected.

30:53Brit Prawat:Yes. And maybe you could write it off that easily, except when they look into Charlie Sneed, he is exactly the type of person who would commit a crime like this.

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32:16Brit Prawat:Charlie Sneed is from New Brunful, Texas with a violent history. I'm talking a destroyed car, being reckless with guns, and literally holding someone hostage. So let's start in June of 83. This is just five months before Toby's murder. Sneed was in the process of divorcing his wife, and he had decided to go over to her best friend Deborah's house to pay her a visit because for some reason, he blamed her for the divorce. Now, Snead didn't want to talk to her. He went over in the middle of the night with a high-powered rifle to shoot up her car while in the driveway. What? So aggressively, by the way, that Deborah thinks he was trying to blow up her car.

32:55Brit Prawat:She obviously woke up, and when she looked out her window, she saw Charlie in the street putting the rifle back behind the backseat of his pickup truck before just, like, driving off.

33:04Ashley Flowers:A silver or silver gray or gray pickup truck?

33:08Brit Prawat:It doesn't say in this report, but there is another report that brings up this truck. So three months after that incident in September of 83, this is now just two months before Toby's murder. Charlie Sneed went out to a random area in like the middle of nowhere, Texas, highly intoxicated and just starts shooting off his rifle at nothing. Unbeknownst to him, on the bluff directly above him were two New Braunfels police officers on break. So they go down and arrest him for a reckless discharge of a firearm. Yeah. Their report makes note of his 1983 beige Chevy pickup truck. Hmm.

33:52Ashley Flowers:Not gray or silver. What kind of vehicle did Hardy have?

33:56Brit Prawat:So this is the thing. We don't know what Stephen Hardy drove, but not for a lack of trying.

34:03Ashley Flowers:I believe you. Okay, so were these two working together?

34:08Brit Prawat:Maybe, but the detectives still don't have anything that connects Harvey and Snead.

34:13Ashley Flowers:They might be, but we have no idea why or how they would be.

34:16Brit Prawat:They're not from the same place. They're not related. So that's what Roe Bashadi goes in search of. Like, what is the connection here? So what he does is he tracks down one of the officers who arrested Sneed back in 83. Now, he's retired by that point, but Robichotti is looking for anything, like point me in the right direction even. Well, immediate jackpot. This officer remembers Charlie Sneed all right, knew him really well actually because the two had gone to school together. So now comes the important question, had he heard of Stephen Hardy? And right away, the officer's like, yup, he was here for about a month or two, and he and Sneed used to run together.

34:57Brit Prawat:Robichotti ends up confirming that when he finds a criminal record for Hardy out of Texas, he was arrested for a bad check in February of 1984. And this would be after Toby's murder now. Now, Robichotti is also able to find a number of stolen vehicle reports filed by Hardy to San Antonio Police Department. And this is where he went down a rabbit hole trying to connect Hardy to a silver truck with the right damage, but he never could. Still, in all the digging, there is clearly enough connecting these two men around the time of the murder. And there's physical evidence that suggests both of them were at this scene, that they were likely working together to rob Toby, and then one of them pulled the trigger before they both fled the scene.

35:48Brit Prawat:This is the theory that detectives Cole and Robichotti present to the ADA, along with all of their supporting evidence. And on January 7th, 2026, 42 years after Toby's murder, The DA writes back saying that there is sufficient probable cause to support a prosecution of the suspects if they were still alive. Because Sneed is also deceased by this point.

36:14Ashley Flowers:So we'll never know who pulled the trigger.

36:18Brit Prawat:No, the murder weapon has never been found. But given Sneed's history, both detectives believe that he was the shooter. Interestingly, though, when Hardy was arrested in 1984, they fingerprinted him. And on the fingerprint card, they mentioned that he had a scar on his lower left index finger, which when you think back to like the crime scene, what he's connected to. Which he could have gotten then during the shooting. It's possible. Like the detectives suspect that he cut himself on one of the broken van windows. But the truth is we have no way of knowing where that scar came from. We don't even know what he was bleeding from.

37:03Brit Prawat:And we know he left his blood there, but we don't know why or how. And really, it doesn't matter. I mean, not legally speaking anyway, because in California, there is a felony murder rule. Now, that's recently become like a bit more complicated. But before 2019, the rule meant that if a group of people commit a crime and then someone dies during that crime.

37:23Ashley Flowers:Everyone gets charged with murder or could be.

37:25Brit Prawat:Even if you had no role in the actual killing itself, even if you didn't intend for anyone to die. Now, as far as we know, Hardy didn't commit any more violent crimes after this. But Sneed kept up the same violent antics. So after Toby's murder, he went back to Texas, still going after his ex's best friend, Debra. Still because of the divorce? Actually, so according to the offense report, this time he was after Debra because he wanted her to drop the charges that she filed when he shot up her car years earlier.

37:57Ashley Flowers:Because of the divorce? Right.

37:59Brit Prawat:Same line, yeah. And this time he switched up his strategy, though. So instead of going straight at Debra, he went after her ex-husband, taking him hostage outside of a bar. What? Pointing a gun to his head and forcing him to drive them both to Debra's house. When they got there, though, this guy fought Snead off and then called police after Snead ran away. Or so he thought, because when officers respond to Debra's house, they find that Snead actually didn't go very far. He was hiding in Debra's closet. Oh, my God. So he spent 20 years in prison for that. Yeah. Got out in 2009, but then died in 2014.

38:35Brit Prawat:So, like I said, any answers that he might have had about what happened or who played what role, gone with him. Regardless, the solve got announced publicly on January 20th, 2026, and Priscilla flew to San Luis Obispo to attend the press conference. It was actually her first time ever being in the county. And until that moment, she told detectives she had this like very dark, evil picture of this area in her mind. But when Detective Robichotti takes her out to the scene of the crime and to the campground, Priscilla said that it actually kind of unexpectedly brought her a lot of peace. Like just knowing that the beautiful California coastline was the last thing her sister saw.

39:19Brit Prawat:She told us it was finally like putting a period at the end of a sentence. But there is a bit of a question mark that I want to leave people with. Something that has been bothering Detective Robichotti. Remember how crime scene investigators determined that Toby was dragged from the driver's seat where she was shot, like, to the back of the van, right? Well, there was male-touch DNA present on her clothing that was consistent with that. According to Robichotti, it's degraded to the point where you can only compare one to one. But they did a comparison with Hardy and with C. Ashley, no. The DNA doesn't match either of them.

40:03Brit Prawat:Or any known persons of interest detectives have thought to compare it to thus far. So there are a few options here. That DNA could belong to one of the old investigators at the scene or medical examiners, like someone present at the autopsy. I mean, Shelby has certainly seen that before, especially in some of these older cases. But unfortunately, according to Detective Cole, everyone who was present at the autopsy is dead. So they can't go get their DNA.

40:30Ashley Flowers:Right. So it could be that. Or we might have a third suspect who could be able to tell us exactly what happened.

40:38Brit Prawat:Yeah. So this is kind of where I think our crime junkies come in. If anyone out there listening by any chance knows something about the 1983 homicide of Dorothy Toby Tate on Highway 1 in San Luis Obispo, or if you knew Charlie Sneed or Stephen Hardy or anyone that they used to hang out with in Texas or California, please come forward. You can reach the San Luis Obispo Sheriff's Office Detectives Division at 805-781-4500 or if you'd rather stay anonymous, you can call the San Luis Obispo County Crime Stoppers at 805-549-7867. Crime Junkie is an Audio Chuck production. I think Chuck would approve.

41:34Brit Prawat:It starts with something small. A light in the sky moving in a way it shouldn't. A sound no one can place. A story someone swears is true, even if no one else believes them. And the more you hear, the harder it gets to explain away. On So Supernatural, we dig into the mysteries that live somewhere between fact, folklore, and the unknown. We follow the stories that make you wonder what else is out there. Listen to So Supernatural wherever you get your podcasts.